Which open-source SaaS are making real money now?

What actually counts as open-source SaaS today?

The open-source SaaS companies making real money today fall into several different licensing models, and mixing them together gives a misleading answer.

The cleanest examples have a meaningful product available under an OSI-approved open-source license and sell a managed cloud service around it. ClickHouse fits that description. Temporal does too. Plausible offers its Community Edition under AGPLv3, while Ghost remains open source and funds development through Ghost(Pro).

Open-core companies sit slightly further along the spectrum. GitLab has an open-source Community Edition while charging for additional enterprise functionality and hosted services. dbt Labs built its commercial cloud around dbt Core. These are still relevant open-source businesses because the open project remains a real product rather than a demo edition created for marketing.

Other popular names need more care. n8n publishes its source and can be self-hosted, yet n8n itself says its Sustainable Use License is fair-code rather than open source because it limits certain commercial uses.

Cal.com also needs an update. Earlier versions of this article could reasonably describe Cal.com as open-core. That became less accurate after the company changed its licensing this year. Cal.com now keeps an MIT-licensed self-hosted community project called Cal.diy while the main commercial product has moved away from the previous open-source model.

MongoDB creates another edge case. MongoDB Community Server uses the Server Side Public License, which is source-available but not approved by the Open Source Initiative.

For the rest of the analysis, we therefore give the most weight to companies where an actual open-source project still sits at the center of the commercial business.

Model today	Examples	Strictly open source?	How money is made
Open source + managed cloud	ClickHouse, Temporal, Plausible, Ghost	Yes	Hosting, usage, operations, support
Open-core	GitLab, dbt	Yes for the core	Cloud subscriptions and enterprise features
Fair-code / source-available	n8n	No	Cloud and enterprise licensing
Split commercial/open project	Cal.com / Cal.diy	Only the separate open edition	Commercial SaaS plus MIT community edition
Non-OSI server license	MongoDB Community Server	No	Atlas and enterprise products

Are open-source SaaS companies really making billions now?

Yes. Open-source and open-core SaaS companies are already generating several billion dollars in recurring or annualized revenue, even when we ignore companies whose numbers come mainly from estimates.

GitLab alone crossed $1 billion in ARR. Grafana Labs recently said it had moved beyond $600 million ARR. ClickHouse has passed $250 million in annualized cloud revenue, and Temporal has disclosed a run rate above $250 million. dbt Labs had crossed $100 million ARR before its combination with Fivetran. PostHog says it has grown beyond $50 million ARR. Ghost's live company metrics now show an annual run rate above $11 million.

Those disclosed numbers add up to more than $2.26 billion before we count Supabase, Plausible, several private infrastructure companies or source-available businesses such as n8n.

The scale is very different from the old open-source startup story. A decade ago, getting an open-source project to a few million dollars of recurring revenue was already notable. Today we have one company above $1 billion, another above $600 million and several businesses around or above $250 million.

The money is also concentrated. Developer infrastructure, databases, observability and workflow systems account for most of the largest numbers.

Company	Latest useful revenue figure	How solid is the figure?
GitLab	>$1B ARR	Company disclosure
Grafana Labs	>$600M ARR	Company disclosure
ClickHouse	>$250M annualized revenue	Company disclosure
Temporal	>$250M annualized revenue	Company disclosure
dbt Labs	>$100M ARR before Fivetran combination	Company disclosure
PostHog	>$50M ARR	Company disclosure
Ghost	>$11M annual run rate	Live company disclosure

How big is GitLab now?

GitLab is still the clearest proof that open-core software can become a billion-dollar SaaS business, and its newest numbers show that growth is continuing well after reaching that scale.

GitLab crossed $1 billion in ARR during its fiscal year 2026 and produced $955.2 million in annual revenue. The company also generated roughly $220 million of free cash flow.

More recent results make that milestone look less like a temporary peak. In its latest reported quarter, GitLab grew revenue 21% year over year and reported record gross bookings.

The user footprint is huge as well. GitLab now says it has more than 50 million registered users and is used by roughly half of the Fortune 100.

That combination tells us more than GitHub stars or open-source downloads ever could. GitLab has managed to turn developer adoption into large enterprise contracts, then expand those contracts through security, governance, CI/CD and AI-related tools.

The commercial product has become much broader than the original source-code collaboration tool. Yet the open-source edition still gives developers and teams a way into the ecosystem before an enterprise purchasing process begins.

Is Grafana really making more than $600 million a year?

Grafana Labs has now surpassed $600 million in annual recurring revenue, making it one of the biggest open-source software businesses we can verify today.

The company also passed 10,000 customers. Two years earlier, Grafana Labs was reporting more than $250 million ARR and roughly 5,000 customers.

Revenue has therefore increased by well over $350 million while the customer base roughly doubled. The average commercial relationship is getting bigger rather than growth coming purely from adding more logos.

Grafana's own recent data explains part of that expansion. Contracted customers used an average of 2.3 Grafana products two years ago. The figure has since risen to 4.4. Almost 88% of contracted customers now use at least two products, and roughly 65% use four or more.

The business is moving well beyond hosted dashboards. Grafana Cloud now spans metrics, logs, traces, application observability, incident response and AI observability.

AI has lately added another source of demand. Grafana says more than 18,000 organizations are already using Grafana Assistant across free and paid accounts. Its observability survey also found that 57% of organizations were implementing some form of LLM observability.

How did ClickHouse get to $250 million so fast?

ClickHouse is currently one of the fastest-growing open-source SaaS companies we can verify: ClickHouse Cloud has passed $250 million in annualized revenue after more than tripling year over year.

The customer count moved almost as quickly. ClickHouse started the year with just over 3,000 cloud customers and passed 4,000 only a few months later. That is more than 1,000 net additions in a single quarter.

The customer base also contains companies with enormous data workloads. ClickHouse has publicly named Anthropic, Meta, Tesla, Sony, Lyft, Instacart and Cursor among its users, while recent additions and expansions included Capital One, Lovable, Decagon, Polymarket and Airwallex.

Database SaaS has unusually strong expansion economics. A developer can start cheaply, but the commercial value grows with queries, storage, concurrency and data volume. A successful customer can become dramatically more valuable without the vendor needing thousands of new employees to license.

AI is adding more fuel. Modern AI products generate large quantities of events, traces, logs and analytical data, and they often need low-latency queries against that information. ClickHouse has expanded directly into those workloads with managed observability products, Postgres infrastructure and agent-oriented analytics.

Is Temporal really a $250 million open-source SaaS now?

Temporal has already passed $250 million in annualized revenue, and the company says that figure has grown by more than 200% year over year.

This is one of the freshest changes in the open-source SaaS landscape. Temporal disclosed the number alongside a $550 million funding round that valued the company at $12.55 billion.

Temporal sells durable execution infrastructure. Developers use it to keep long-running software workflows alive when servers crash, APIs fail or individual steps need to be retried.

That sounds specialized until we look at the software being built now. Payment flows, order processing and other distributed applications already needed durable workflows. AI agents make the same problem much larger because an agent can perform dozens of actions across multiple systems over a long period of time.

If one API call fails halfway through an hour-long process, rebuilding the whole state manually is a mess. Temporal handles that recovery layer.

The open-source project was created before the agent boom, but the new generation of long-running AI software happens to need exactly the reliability layer Temporal already built.

Is Supabase making real money or mostly raising money?

Supabase is unquestionably a large commercial platform now, although its exact revenue remains less verifiable than the numbers from GitLab, Grafana, ClickHouse or Temporal.

The hardest numbers come from usage and financing rather than revenue. Supabase recently raised $500 million at a $10 billion pre-money valuation. The company says nearly 10 million developers now build on Supabase, more than twice as many as eight months before that disclosure.

Database launches also grew 600% over the previous year.

The AI connection here is unusually concrete. Supabase says more than 60% of new databases are currently launched by some type of AI tool. Claude Code, Codex and other coding agents can choose and configure backend infrastructure while writing an application, which gives developer platforms a distribution channel that barely existed a few years ago.

Independent estimates place Supabase's ARR well into nine figures, but we should keep those figures separate from company-reported revenue. A $10 billion valuation does not prove a specific level of sales either.

What we can say confidently is that Supabase has reached enormous developer distribution and is converting at least part of that activity into a major cloud business. Its exact recurring revenue is still much less transparent than that of the companies above.

Did dbt actually build a $100 million business from open source?

dbt Labs turned dbt Core into a SaaS business above $100 million ARR, so the commercial case for open-source data tooling is already proven.

The company crossed $100 million ARR after growing from roughly $2 million in four years. It had also passed 5,000 customers by that point, while adoption among Fortune 500 companies had risen 85% year over year.

dbt's path is straightforward. Analysts and data engineers adopted dbt Core because it made data transformation behave more like software engineering. Companies then paid for dbt Cloud to get managed execution, collaboration, administration, governance and enterprise tooling around that workflow.

The useful number is the jump from $2 million to more than $100 million ARR. That is a fiftyfold increase in four years.

dbt Labs is now combining with Fivetran, which makes the standalone company harder to track going forward. The two businesses said the combined operation was approaching $600 million ARR.

We should not assign that $600 million to dbt. Fivetran contributes a large share.

Has PostHog become a serious SaaS company?

PostHog has grown beyond $50 million ARR, which puts the former open-source product-analytics startup firmly into serious SaaS territory.

What makes PostHog interesting is how the product changed while the business grew. The company originally looked like an open-source alternative to product analytics products such as Mixpanel and Amplitude.

Today it sells a much wider toolkit covering product analytics, session replay, feature flags, experiments, surveys, error tracking, data pipelines, logs and AI-related observability.

That expansion changes the economics. A customer who initially uses one analytics product can gradually send more events, add more workloads and buy additional tools without PostHog needing to acquire that company again.

The company has also said that the overwhelming majority of users pay nothing. For PostHog, that free population acts as a large developer funnel while a much smaller group of production customers pays according to usage.

Can a small open-source SaaS make real money without venture capital?

Yes. Ghost and Plausible show that open-source SaaS can support durable, profitable businesses without needing the scale, funding or risk profile of GitLab or ClickHouse.

Ghost's live company page now shows an annual run rate above $11 million. A few years ago, Ghost reported around $4 million, so the business has grown dramatically while remaining independent and structured around the nonprofit Ghost Foundation.

The model is easy to understand. Anyone can use Ghost's open-source publishing software, while customers pay Ghost(Pro) to avoid hosting, maintaining and updating it themselves.

Plausible provides an even cleaner bootstrapped example. The company says more than 21,000 paying subscribers currently use its privacy-focused analytics service. Plausible remains independent, profitable and funded entirely through subscriptions.

Plausible crossed $1 million ARR back in 2022 with a little over 7,000 paying customers. The paying customer base has since roughly tripled.

The company still offers Plausible Community Edition under AGPLv3. Anyone willing to maintain the software can self-host it for free, yet more than 21,000 customers choose the paid cloud version anyway.

Which famous “open-source SaaS” companies do not really count anymore?

n8n, Cal.com and MongoDB are commercially important, but putting all three into a strict open-source SaaS ranking today would blur the definition too much.

n8n is the easiest case. Its source is public, users can self-host it and the project has built an enormous developer following. Yet the company itself explains that the Sustainable Use License is fair-code rather than open source because some commercial uses are restricted.

The distinction does nothing to diminish n8n's commercial success. The company has raised large financing rounds, serves thousands of enterprise customers and has become one of the best-known automation platforms in the AI ecosystem. It simply belongs in the source-available category.

Cal.com changed more recently. The company spent years championing an open-source model and built a meaningful scheduling business around it. This year, Cal.com announced that its main product would move away from that model. The company launched Cal.diy as a separate MIT-licensed community edition for self-hosting.

Independent research from Sacra estimates Cal.com reached about $10 million ARR this year, more than double its 2024 level. That remains an interesting business result, but the current licensing change makes Cal.com a weaker example for an article specifically asking which open-source SaaS companies are making money now.

MongoDB is much larger, yet MongoDB Community Server has used the Server Side Public License since the company moved away from AGPL. The Open Source Initiative does not recognize SSPL as an open-source license.

Why do people discover open-source SaaS for free and then pay for it?

Open source brings customers in cheaply, while managed SaaS gets paid when the software becomes important enough that companies no longer want to operate it themselves.

Supabase gives us one of the clearest acquisition examples now. Nearly 10 million developers use the platform, and its GitHub repository has crossed 100,000 stars. A developer can choose Supabase before anyone from procurement, IT or finance is involved.

GitLab followed a similar path through software teams. Grafana spread through infrastructure and observability teams. dbt Core became familiar to data practitioners before many of their employers ever considered paying dbt Labs.

The open-source project reduces the cost of trying the product. It lets technical users inspect it, extend it, deploy it themselves and learn it without a sales call.

The paid conversion tends to happen later, when running the product becomes painful or risky.

A developer can install ClickHouse without paying ClickHouse Inc. A company running billions of queries still needs replication, backups, upgrades, scaling, security, observability and engineers who know what to do when something breaks.

Plausible shows the same behavior at a smaller scale. Its Community Edition can be self-hosted for free, yet more than 21,000 customers pay for the hosted service.

GitLab adds enterprise controls such as security, governance, compliance and administration once usage spreads across a large organization. ClickHouse and PostHog can also charge more naturally as queries, events, logs or data volumes rise.

GitHub popularity alone is not enough. Ghost is already above an $11 million annual run rate without anything close to Supabase's GitHub reach, while some heavily starred projects monetize poorly.

The best open-source funnels connect free technical adoption directly to a future workload that becomes expensive, important or annoying to manage.

Is AI making open-source SaaS grow faster right now?

AI is currently giving several open-source SaaS companies a genuine growth boost because AI software creates more databases, telemetry, workflows and infrastructure usage.

Supabase has the cleanest number. The company says more than 60% of new databases are now created by some form of AI tool, while total database launches grew 600% over the previous year.

ClickHouse is benefiting further down the stack. AI products produce huge quantities of events and operational data that need to be queried quickly. ClickHouse Cloud has more than tripled annualized revenue to above $250 million while AI-native companies such as Anthropic, Cursor, Lovable and Decagon have appeared in its customer base.

Temporal gets another type of AI workload. Agents frequently call several models, APIs and tools over long periods. They need retries, state and recovery when one step fails. Temporal already solved that problem for conventional distributed software, and its annualized revenue has now grown more than 200% to above $250 million.

Grafana sits around all of that infrastructure. Grafana Labs recently passed $600 million ARR, while more than 18,000 organizations are using its AI assistant.

These businesses were growing before the latest AI boom. What AI is doing now is increasing the amount of software being created and the infrastructure each application can consume.

Where is the biggest money in open-source SaaS today?

Infrastructure is where open-source SaaS is making the most money today, and the gap versus ordinary application software is huge.

GitLab is above $1 billion ARR. Grafana is above $600 million. ClickHouse and Temporal have both crossed $250 million. dbt had already passed $100 million.

All five sit close to software development, data or infrastructure.

Compare that with some of the strongest smaller application examples. Ghost is now above an $11 million annual run rate. Plausible has more than 21,000 paying subscribers and is profitable. Cal.com's commercial business is externally estimated around $10 million ARR, although its licensing model has now changed.

The difference can easily reach one or two orders of magnitude.

Infrastructure has a structural advantage here. Revenue can grow with machines, data, events, queries, developers or workloads, while an application subscription often remains tied to a relatively predictable number of human seats.

Category	Current examples	Revenue ceiling we can already see
DevOps / software delivery	GitLab	$1B+ ARR
Observability	Grafana Labs	$600M+ ARR
Databases / analytics infrastructure	ClickHouse	$250M+ annualized revenue
Workflow infrastructure	Temporal	$250M+ annualized revenue
Data engineering	dbt Labs	$100M+ ARR before combination
Developer analytics platform	PostHog	$50M+ ARR
Publishing / web analytics	Ghost, Plausible	Multi-million-dollar sustainable businesses

Are the big open-source SaaS companies actually profitable?

Some open-source SaaS companies are already profitable, while others are deliberately spending heavily to capture larger enterprise markets.

GitLab gives us the best large-company evidence because its financial statements are public. The company produced roughly $220 million of free cash flow during the fiscal year in which it crossed $1 billion ARR.

Its GAAP results were weaker because stock compensation and other expenses still weighed on accounting profit. Even so, the cash generation makes it difficult to argue that the commercial model itself has failed.

At the other end of the market, Plausible openly says it is profitable, takes no outside investment and funds the company entirely from subscriptions.

Ghost has also operated for years without the conventional venture-backed SaaS model. Revenue from Ghost(Pro) finances the nonprofit foundation and development of the open-source product.

ClickHouse, Temporal and Supabase are much harder to judge from outside because they are private and continue raising large rounds while expanding rapidly.

So “open source” tells us very little about profitability by itself. Plausible can optimize for a small profitable team, while Temporal can spend aggressively while annualized revenue grows above 200%.

Which open-source SaaS are making real money now?

Yes, open-source SaaS is making very real money now, with the strongest companies ranging from profitable businesses doing several million dollars a year to enterprise platforms above $1 billion in recurring revenue.

GitLab remains the biggest clear example in this group with more than $1 billion ARR. The business has kept growing after crossing that threshold rather than flattening out immediately.

Grafana Labs has moved above $600 million ARR and doubled its customer base to more than 10,000 in roughly two years.

ClickHouse and Temporal have both crossed $250 million in annualized revenue. Their speed is especially striking: ClickHouse more than tripled year over year, while Temporal says its run rate grew above 200%.

dbt Labs had crossed $100 million ARR before combining with Fivetran. PostHog is above $50 million. Ghost's live metrics now show an annual run rate above $11 million. Plausible has more than 21,000 paying customers while remaining bootstrapped and profitable.

Supabase almost certainly belongs among the major commercial winners as well. Nearly 10 million developers use it, database launches have grown 600%, and investors recently valued the company at $10 billion pre-money. We simply have less reliable public revenue data for Supabase, so giving it a precise position beside companies that disclose ARR would create false accuracy.

The licensing boundaries also matter more now than they did a few years ago. n8n is fair-code rather than strictly open source. MongoDB uses SSPL. Cal.com recently moved its main commercial product away from its previous open-source structure while preserving Cal.diy as an MIT-licensed community project.

The biggest open-source SaaS businesses today sell infrastructure that developers can adopt freely and companies eventually find difficult to operate themselves. Databases, observability, workflow engines, data tools and development platforms dominate the upper end of the revenue table.

Smaller businesses prove the model works outside venture-backed infrastructure too. Ghost and Plausible show that a founder does not need hundreds of millions in funding or a billion-dollar market to turn open-source software into a sustainable SaaS company.

As seen above, just GitLab, Grafana Labs, ClickHouse, Temporal, dbt Labs, PostHog and Ghost account for more than $2.26 billion in disclosed annualized or recurring revenue. That leaves out Supabase because its exact current revenue is not publicly disclosed, Plausible because the company does not publish a fresh ARR figure, and several source-available companies that do not meet a strict open-source definition.

That $2.26 billion figure is therefore a conservative floor from a small group of companies rather than an estimate of the entire market.

The useful question is no longer whether open-source SaaS can make money. We now have several companies at $100 million-plus, two above $600 million and one above $1 billion. The real dividing line is whether the open-source product sits close enough to an expensive production workload for free adoption to turn into serious recurring revenue.